Some Vympels

A missile set

My sprue contained six lumps of missile, of two variants. Four of those came with a pointy end, two of them with a blunt one, those were the only differences between them. I decided to make this missile painting subprocess a bit easier for me by painting as much of them as possible while they were still attached to the sprue.

The bits were not fully formed yet, I was to glue two large-ish canards to them still. At this point I was thinking if I should carve the rocket engine openings or not.

Primed

There wasn't much to say about the priming of these bits: I primed them white and left them to dry. My plan was to continue this way a bit further by painting them white and then cut them off for fine-tuning, fixing and detail painting.

Please refer to...

Judging by what a quick image searching brought up, I could just paint them white and either leave it at that (a very easy solution), or add some highlights. Somewhere I saw the canards done so that an opposing pair was white, the other pair black or dark grey. Or the leading edges of the canards were white while the rest was dark grey. Some wing versions weren't dark grey but more like unpainted metal, or so they looked like to me. Some, many in fact, missiles also had black bands here and there, but they looked like they'd stand out a bit too much in this scale.

These pics above made my mind: I'd use the second picture as an inspiration for the nose cones and the wings, otherwise it'd obey the first one. I started by basecoating the set of missiles with insignia white (VMA 71279).

I hoped they ended being visibly different from the primed ones

The next time I got to paint I started with the pointy four and painted their radomes with light grey (VMA 71276 USAF Light Grey), the rounder two I left as they were. Had they been camera-guided, I'd built lenses on them but enough of the photos I'd seen always showed the R-27s plain white.

Next I painted the tail wings and the canards of the full set with a metallic paint (VMC 70865 Oily Steel). This first round didn't leave them as clean as I had wanted to, partially because of the noticeable age of the paint and the thickening this had caused. Maybe I'd touch them up with some steel or chrome later on. Also the missile bodies themselves were going to need a bit of fixing with off-white, but that was going to need doing anyway after the missiles were detached.

Detached

When the paint had gotten properly dry I cut the sextet off. I cut the attachment points off from the front end and cleaned the back ends flat. Then I retired for the night, thinking what I'd do to them the next evening.

For the missiles the next step was clear: I searched for my drill and first made a hole into the bottom of one missile's rear end with one of the narrowest drill bits, thinking that I'd open it up a bit with the old xacto knife. With bits this small it was a bit too dangerous, so for the next missile I switched the widest drill bit, which was still narrower than the diameter of the missile itself. This large bit worked just fine and I used that one for all the remaining missiles.

I couldn't use the large bit to improve the first missile, for the hole I had made was too far off-centre. The same misalignment issue plagued my full missile set, but I didn't let that bother me. Now I repainted the most offensive parts of the missiles, still with the insignia white (VMA 71279), then after all did the heat-seeking missile's tips with the light grey (VMA 71276) and the insides of the rocket engine openings with just plain black (VGC 72051).

Vympel R-27R

On my palm I now had four sharp-nosed midrange air-to-air missiles with a semiactive radar homing R-27R missiles. In the real world these four-meter-long sticks, being a few centimetres narrower than a sheet of A4 paper and weighing about 250kg with an almost 40kg warhead. Their velocity was a respectable (according to Wikipedia, unconfirmed) 4.5 Mach.

Vympel R-27T

The final two missiles were model R-27T, meaning they sported an infrared homing module and they were recognizeable by their round nose cones. These missiles had only half of the range, 40km, compared to their radar-seeking counterparts, but the rest of the specs were naturally the same as the only difference between the R and T variants was this sole module.

The layout

Just for the fun of it I laid out the missiles' layout under the plane. I thought that the R-sticks were going to be loaded near the centre of the plane, next to the engines and the T versions a bit further from the engines, below the wings. Not that I thought that made any actual difference for real.